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In the past three decades, fire engineering has experienced fast development worldwide. Fire regulations for building industry were moved from prescriptive description to performance-based specification. This trend started in the UK in the 1980s and spread to other western countries. Hong Kong closely followed the UK development and adopted the approach of performance-based design (PBD) for the Hong Kong International Airport and MTR stations in the early 1990s. The Government of Hong Kong SAR formally recognised the PBD approach in the prescriptive codes of practice in the mid-1990s and developed the performance-based code (PBC) in the 2000s. This PBC was promulgated in 2011. The evolution in fire engineering impacted the fire community in Mainland China. The State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) was established in University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1991. Then fire science and fire engineering stepped into the fast development track. The building industry in Mainland China started to adopt the PBD approach in the early 2000s for the significant developments including large airport terminals, railway and metro stations, super high-rise buildings, and mega commercial centres. However, a structured PBC system is not available within the regulatory framework to date. Adoption of PBD approach is slowing down in recent years. This paper presents a review of fire engineering development in Hong Kong and Mainland China. The review focuses on the development of the PBC in Hong Kong, and the PBD approach and fire research in Mainland China in the past 30 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building energy performance improvement of large-scale public buildings is very important to release China's energy shortage pressure. The aim of the study is to find out the building energy saving potentials of large-scale public and commercial buildings by energy audit. In this paper, the energy consumption, energy performance, and audit were carried out for a typical commercial mall, the so-called largest mall in Asia, located in a hot-summer and warm-winter climate zone. The total annual energy consumption reaches 210.01 kWh/m, of which lighting energy consumption accounts for 30.03 kWh/m and the lift and elevator energy consumption accounts for 40.46 kWh/m. It is by far higher than that of the average building energy consumption in the same category. However, the annual heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) energy consumption is only 87.19 kWh/m even though they run 24/7. It proves that the energy performance of the HVAC system is good. Therefore, the building energy savings potential mainly relies on reducing the excessive usage of lighting, lifts, and elevators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction is an important sector for climate action. The construction, operation and maintenance, demolition and disposal stages of house buildings consume many resources and have a significant impact on society, the economy and the environment. To assess such efforts, we propose the emergy footprint model of house buildings, which can quantitatively analyse the ecological effect in the house buildings life cycle. The research shows the following. China's ecological efficiency of the housing sector is characterized by improvement. In the house building fifty-year life cycle, the emergy footprint of the operation and maintenance stage is the largest (75.92%), followed by the construction stage (21.95%), but the emergy footprint intensity of the latter is 4.82 times that of the former. Reducing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in the operation and maintenance stage is the key to reducing the life cycle emergy footprint of house buildings. The ecological impact coefficient of house buildings is negatively exponentially correlated with their service life. It reaches ecological break-even when the service period of the house building is equal to 36.73 years. If the house building is demolished after less than nine years of service, the impact is extremely unfavourable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: China has proposed the carbon emission target in 2020, and timber building is one of the solutions to reduce carbon emission in building sector. This study conducts a comparative study to quantitative analysis of the decarbonization potential of timber buildings from a life cycle perspective. Methods: Seven representative demonstration projects with a timber structure in China were selected as research objects. The materials inventory was collected. Based on China's national standard Standard for Building Carbon Emission Calculation (GB/T51366-2019), the life cycle carbon emissions from all 5 stages, including production, transportation, construction, operation, and demolition stages, are calculated. The assessment results are compared to ordinary reinforced concrete buildings and ultra-low energy buildings. Results and discussion: The findings indicated that carbon emissions in the operation stage of buildings accounted for an average of 87.7% of carbon emission in the total life-cycle of buildings. Compared to ordinary buildings made of reinforced concrete, timber buildings can reduce carbon emissions in the production stage by 64.5%. Therefore, from a life-cycle perspective, 11.0% of carbon emissions can be saved. By upgrading energy efficiency to ultra-low energy buildings, although the carbon emission from building material may increase by 28.5%, the carbon emission is significantly reduced by 39.3% during the operation stage, with a 32.7% reduction for the life cycle. Conclusions: This study provides a life cycle assessment of carbon emission of 7 timber buildings in China. The timber buildings only contribute to the decarbonization for the production stage. Around 11.0% of carbon emissions can be saved for timber structures. Meanwhile, 32.7% more carbon emissions can be saved by upgrading the energy efficiency to ultra-low energy buildings. This study also shows LCA is an effective tool for evaluating the contributions of different aspects and to ensure the achievement of carbon emission targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A numerical model based on the compressible flow equations has been used to simulate the pedestrian wind fields around the programming tall buildings in Beijing city. The model results are well agreed with those of the wind tunnel experiments. Since numerical model can provide the detailed flow field data at each grid point and each time step, it has a great advantage compared with the wind tunnel experiment in accurately evaluating the wind effects on pedestrian and other environmental issues. Furthermore, advance computational technology has made the numerical modeling become fast and cheaply. It is believed that the numerical simulation will play an increasingly more important role in the coming years, especially in dealing with wind environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]